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When war was declared I was fifteen and my school was evacuated from Putney to Caversham, Reading. My friend and I were billeted with a couple in their forties who had no children. After a term our school re-opened in Putney in different premises as our buildings had been taken over by the Metropolitan Police! We returned to Caversham to take our school certificate. In the school holidays I joined my sister and her College friends picking plums at an agricultural camp. I also did some first Aid training.
At home we had a Morrison shelter in the dining room but when relatives joined us for respite from the bombing of Croydon aerodrome, we slept on mattresses on the lounge floor. My mother was an air raid warden and father a sergeant in the Home Guard. Incendiary bombs were the worst hazard.
At seventeen I left school and started nursing at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. I was supplied with uniform, starched collar and cap and went straight on to the men’s ward. All patients had to be able to be moved to the basement if necessary so the more complicated cases were at the country branch out at Stanmore. There was endless cleaning but I learned treatments and patient care. Off duty was half a day one week and a whole day the next. Too bad if a lecture was scheduled for your day off! My salary was £2 6s 8d a month.
On the advice of my G.P. I applied to Guy’s Hospital and started there in 1942. It was very different, four months of preliminary training with teaching of patient care, invalid cookery, physiology and anatomy. The latter was in the medical school and demonstrated on actual bodies.
After this I was sent to base hospital at Orpington. The hospital was in Prefab huts on either side of a main duckboard corridor and nurses accommodation was at the end. We had curtained cubicles, communal washbasins and baths with a red line marking the permitted water level. Each month we collected our personal ration of jam, sugar and butter. The wards were for the full range of care as well as an RAF ward, geriatric wards and children’s ENT surgery. We dealt with casualties sent from the London bombing after initial treatment at Guy’s. They often needed orthopaedic treatment. There were also patients needing elective orthopaedic surgery. Penicillin was used for the first time. Initially by slow drip, later by injection.
Back at Guy’s I did medical and surgical nursing as well as psychiatric. This was unique to Guy’s. The patients had a mixture of conditions. Treatment was with medication, analysis, ECT and occupational therapy. We escorted them on walks and sometimes to film or theatre previews. We were involved in pioneering treatment in several specialities because of the status of our Hospital Consultants.
Off duty we had occasional dances, got free theatre or concert tickets and played squash. I was able to go home on my ‘days off’. When peace was announced a group of us, students, nurses and sisters went into central London to join in the excitement. I rode round Leicester Square on a Coster’s barrow and we joined the crowds outside Buckingham Palace. We shouted for the King and danced in front of the railings.
A bonfire was lit in the hospital Park to celebrate.
The Victory Parade came some time later. My
father filmed it and I now have it
transferred to video.

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